Folks, today we are releasing Synapse 1.15.2, which is a security release which contains fixes to two separate problems. We are also putting out the second release candidate for the forthcoming Synapse 1.16, including the same fixes.
Firstly, we have fixed a bug in the implementation of the room state resolution algorithm which could cause users to be unexpectedly ejected from rooms (Synapse issue #7742).
Secondly, we have improved the security of pages served as part of the Single-Sign-on login flows to prevent clickjacking attacks. Thank you to Quentin Gliech for reporting this.
We are not aware of either of these vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild, but we recommend that administrators upgrade as soon as possible. Those on Synapse 1.15.1 or earlier should upgrade to Synapse 1.15.2, while those who have already upgraded to Synapse 1.16.0rc1 should upgrade to 1.16.0rc2.
Get the new releases from any of the usual sources mentioned at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/INSTALL.md. 1.15.2 is on github here, and 1.16.0rc2 is here.
Changelog for 1.15.2 follows:
Synapse 1.15.2 (2020-07-02)
Due to the two security issues highlighted below, server administrators are
encouraged to update Synapse. We are not aware of these vulnerabilities being
exploited in the wild.
Security advisory
A malicious homeserver could force Synapse to reset the state in a room to a
small subset of the correct state. This affects all Synapse deployments which
federate with untrusted servers. (96e9afe6)
HTML pages served via Synapse were vulnerable to clickjacking attacks. This
predominantly affects homeservers with single-sign-on enabled, but all server
administrators are encouraged to upgrade. (ea26e9a9)
Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.
In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, unfortunately our three MSCs from last week ( MSC2366 (verification flows), MSC2403 (knocking), and MSC2630 (SAS security)) are still pre-FCP. Most of the team has been quite busy with implementation for the past few weeks. Instead of advertising those 3 MSCs again, we're going to switch the focus to "implementation" for a bit until we're freed up again.
So the focus for this week is: MSC implementation work. However, this should not discourage any MSC authors from responding to MSC feedback in the meantime 🙂
This week in the ruma/matrix Google Summer of Code project, ruma-events was made ready for use! After adding stripped and sync event generation to the event_enum! macro there were only a few small tweaks needed to try it out in some dependent rust crates. I spent a few days converting matrix-rust-sdk to use the ruma-monorepo. Since ruma is used on both client and server-side, I also opened a PR to update Conduit, a homeserver implementation written in Rust. To test that everything worked together, I updated rumatui, my command-line client written in rust.
Then I could test that Conduit sent, and matrix-rust-sdk received the new ruma events successfully. While updating, I felt the pain of not having accessor methods for the Any*Event enums to get at the event fields held within. I have opened a pull request to add the generation of these methods to the event_enums! macro. Hopefully, the Conduit and matrix-sdk PR's will be merged and the ruma monorepo can be tested in the wild!
Moved matrix protocol, irc protocol, and bridge module to futures 0.3. Converted some utility functions to new futures, and updated the http implementation to use the standardized Hyper library instead of using a custom http implementation.
Created PR for enabling e2ee across all services! This required a few changes to how the bot client is initialised, as well as changes to all services to use the new functionality instead of directly sending messages to a room. https://github.com/matrix-org/go-neb/pull/324
Added code from another of tulir's projects to Mautrix to allow storing the crypto material (olm / megolm sessions, accounts etc.) in a SQL database, adding a second way besides using Gob storage. https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-go/pull/10
Future plans are to work on the library itself to add any features that might be missing.
Using the same design as Riot. However, I am just using flexbox and text instead of drawing on an HTML5 canvas. The HSL color is generated by hashing the user ID.
Quoting and replying
Added on-hover buttons and reply popup above message composer similar to Riot web. Quoting prepends the message (quoted) to the message composer similar to Riot web and replying would also work similar to Riot web. It will be fully functional once markdown parsing is added.
Guest access
The client now supports guest access. If no access token or user ID is provided in the configuration file, the client attempts to register a guest account on the home server. Room contents are viewed using peekInRoom.
If the guest attempts to send a message, only then joinRoom is called to avoid spam (each page load would lead to a guest joining the room).
This week has been mainly about testing to ensure that all the progress over the past few months is kept up-to-date and correct. We've also added a few features in order to get certain sytests working. To that end:
Invites can now be declined over federation and they will be reflected in /sync responses.
Errors encountered when joining a room over federation are now sent back to the client.
Errors encountered when accepting an invite over federation are now sent back to the client.
Dendrite will now check server names meet the server name grammar in the specification.
A bug which caused client-api-proxy to not actually proxy correctly has been fixed, thanks @fantashley !
/send now abides by the limits in the specification: 50 PDUs / 100 EDUs.
The docker-compose scripts now include appservice_api, thanks @fantashley !
Sending invites over federation will now fall back to v1 if v2 fails with a 404.
Dendrite now implements room.timeline.limit completely (in both in-line and stored filter formats).
Dendrite now sets the limited flag on /sync responses correctly.
In addition, we now have support for collecting code coverage output from SyTest. This indicates we are testing roughly 70% of the Dendrite codebase. The remaining 30% are hard to reach via integration tests (e.g database failures, communication problems between internal APIs).
Spec compliance:
Client-Server APIs: 45%, up from 40% last week
Server-Server APIs: 50%, up from 38% last week
In total, we've made an additional 45 sytests pass this week.
This week we’ve been working on further improvements to event persistence and ironed out a nasty bug where an unusually long state resolution could block the reactor overall and impact send times. We seem to have got to the bottom of this and m.org has improved a lot as of today.
More generally we’ve been trying to characterise matrix.org performance so that we can continue to improve over the coming months.
We are going to focus on:-
Client send event
Outbound Federation Latency
Inbound Federation Latency
Room joins
As well as tracking the CS API generally.
We are using apdex with a satisfied limit of 250 ms and a tolerating limit of 1000 ms. By the end of the Summer we will aim to hit an apdex score of 0.9 for each area.
For instance here is Federation Send Event Apdex graphed overtime. You can see that we are averaging about ~0.8 currently, so plenty to keeping us busy!
Next up will be to work on Outbound Federation Latency
Aside from that we’ve been working hard on the upcoming Notifications improvements. Mapping the push rules to the demands of the UI has been challenging and we’ve been through several iterations. If you’d like to learn more take a look at Michael and Rich’s explanation in this week’s Matrix Live. Rich’s presentation has Sheltie pictures #justsayin’
The Telegram bridge now supports logging in by scanning a QR code, although it requires using the master branch of Telethon instead of a release. I also fixed bridging captions in file messages, so they're now bridged as separate messages like with images
Hey all, I've got several releases to talk about this week!
First, matrix-appservice-slack has been updated to 1.4.0 with several quality of life changes such as automatically setting the bot profile on startup, supporting logging out of slack accounts and adding a health checkpoint. There are also quite a few bugfixes so make sure you update.
matrix-appservice-irc was also bumped to 0.18.0 with the headline features being Node 14.x support.
We've also shipped 0.19.0-rc1 which has stopped support for Node 10.x. Why? Because we're adding worker support to the bridge! This release starts to make use of the new(ish) worker_threads feature so that we can dish out processing to separate threads (running their own UV event loops, for node enthusiasts). The first thing to be workerized is metrics, so that metrics may still be reported should the bridge become saturated, but we plan to split out more work as things progress.
Finally matrix-appservice-bridge got a few fixes to support our new worker land, as well as being updated to support matrix-js-sdk 6.0.0. You can checkout the changes for 1.13.1 here.
Fluffychat Version 0.15.0 is released, and should be available in the Play Store, on F-Droid and in IOS Testflight soon! This makes Fluffychat the first non-Riot matrix client that supports Cross-Signing.
Features:
New room list app bar design
Chat app bar transparent
Implement web file picker
Minor design and UX improvements
Implement Cross Signing
Restore keys from online key backup
Added translations: Czech, Spanish, Slovakian
Changes:
Show presences of users sharing a direct chat
Big refactoring
Fixes:
Various fixes, including e2ee fixes and olm session recovery
Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE (with the notable exception being device verification for now) and intends to be full featured and nice to look at
Most of our time this week was spent trying out device verification with Chethan. It's fun and I could finally file bugs in Nheko against someone else!
We fixed some issues that should hopefully make text in the timeline less blurry again.
Fixed a bug which cause some clients like fluffychat to break in E2EE rooms (we accidentally sent a null relation when not replying...)
Fixed an issue, where Nheko didn't verify the format of html formatted messages correctly, causing it to render messages in a way which wasn't compliant to the spec.
Thanks to the work of a Pirate and his friends, current versions of Nheko should be available in backports for Debian Buster once again!
Riot Chat for Nextcloud 0.5.0 The new version updated the Riot.im version to 1.6.6 and added the ability for admins to set their own custom config for Riot rather then using the settings interface in addition to a few bug fixes.
Riot Chat for Nextcloud allows individuals and organizations with a Nextcloud instance to easily set up and configure their own Riot instance with just a few clicks on a web interface without the need to write a config file.
This week, we completed UX for cross-signing and secure backup. We made associated settings but we still need to polish them.
Sygnal and the new push extension have been updated to match Apple requirement and our privacy concerns. Events content are no more sent anymore.
We started to implement the new room notifications settings UI.
We will publish at the beginning of next week a beta version of the migration to RiotX codebase on the beta channel of the PlayStore, to be able to ensure the migration works fine, before release it to production.
joepie91 discovered this project, presented yesterday at Conference in the Cloud:
Net::Matrix::Webhook implements a webhook, so you can easily post messages to your matrix chat rooms via HTTP requests. It uses IO::Async to start a web server and connect as a client to matrix. It will then forward your messages.
Soru wrote a quick program that scrapes riot-web, riot-x and riot-ios for translations of the emoji names for emoji verification and combines them all into an easily-readable json file, so that other client developers can use it. Since all three riot versions have a different set of translations, it might also be helpful for them. You can find the source code along with the outputted json files here.
Like the other bots, you can self-host it, use my instance (@satw:maunium.net) in your own room or simply join #satwcomic:maunium.net to automatically get the latest comics in Matrix.
A bot that will allow to room administrators and moderators to generate room custom commands (in a similar way how telegram commands are thought).
When they are invoked it will post the message event object data and a predefined context object along with a token to a custom url. More information in: https://gitlab.com/communia/matrix-webhooker
Drupal module to receive links shared from a matrix room. Get links provided by a matrix bot in a room.
With this module one can get media from a matrix own bot to any drupal site. Once installed and bot is created through matrix-webhooker bot.
A blog entry about it (in spanish) in https://planet.communia.org/content/enlaces-desde-matrix
Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰
Pollvis - new poll visualiser project
We have a couple of conferences coming up who are planning to use Matrix as part of their offering, much as we do with Open Tech Will Save Us. To help add some more features, I created an MVP "poll visualiser", which watches a room and works in tandem with the poll-bot from Brendan Abolivier . This project is still at the beginning, but might be interesting to some! Find the code at https://github.com/benparsons/pollvis.
Dept of Ping 🏓
Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server. Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.
Rank
Hostname
Median MS
1
fairydust.space
331
2
services.pyrahex.com
537
3
heitkoetter.net
604
4
nitro.chat
646.5
5
mchus.pro
660
6
privacytools.io
671
7
matrix.vgorcum.com
727.5
8
eiselecloud.de
740
9
aruiz.io
855
10
neko.dev
923.5
That's all I know 🏁
See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!
Are you emerging from lockdown? Dazed and wondering what to wear? Need some apparel which says "I'm cool and I have great taste in decentralised communications protocols"? Then you should visit The Matrix Merch Store!
T-Shirts, Hoodies, Zipped Hoodies and Stickers available now!
Matrix Decomposition: Analysis of an Access Control Approach on Transaction-based DAGs without Finality
We published another scientific paper on Matrix, this time it is called Matrix Decomposition: Analysis of an Access Control Approach on Transaction-based DAGs without Finality!
Its main topic is the question of how access control can work based on a structure that only provides a partial order on events and no consensus on the current state, i.e. the Matrix Event Graph. We found some concrete, non-critical security issues related to both incorrect specification as well as divergent homeserver behaviour. While the last remaining mitigations found their way into Synapse 1.14.0, we provide ideas on structural solutions to avoid both problem classes in the future using formal verification.
Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.
In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, the team has been spread a bit thin with other work. As such, we're still on the same three MSCs: MSC2366 (verification flows), MSC2403 (knocking), and MSC2630 (SAS security). We're hoping this week will be more productive in terms of spec.
Dept of Servers 🏢
Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib
Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go
This week has seen a lot of work put into fixing broken tests and refactoring parts of the codebase.
The media API has had quite a bit of attention this week and now media over federation works properly, as well as much better filename handling
A new user API component is now responsible for user accounts, devices, access tokens and account data
The server key API has been updated with more reliable validity checking and new tests
Logging into Dendrite using Riot iOS is now supported thanks to some minor tweaks/fixes
URL handling for version 3 rooms has been improved
A bug in the format of /v1/send_join has been fixed
The /joined_members response has now been fixed
In addition to that, we've made good progress on embedding the Dendrite-powered Yggdrasil demo into Riot iOS, which we'll hopefully be demoing in a couple of weeks!
We released 1.15.1, this is a bug fix release, sorry if you were bitten.
Changelog in full
Bugfixes
Fix a bug introduced in v1.15.0 that would crash Synapse on start when using certain password auth providers.
Fix a bug introduced in v1.15.0 which meant that some 3PID management endpoints were not accessible on the correct URL.
Outside of that
Implemented unread message counts (MSC 2625) - This is part of the a more general notifications improvement project in conjunction with the Riot teams. The aim being to make Notifications easier to configure. We’ve also been working on push rule definitions for the default behaviour. More on that next week.
Have the ability to shard the media repository worker. This means we can now run an arbitrary number in parallel, thereby improving upload reliability and performance, we are running this on Matrix.org.
Re-enabled Jaeger on matrix.org - previously we needed to switch it off due to the performance overhead, we needed a few tweaks but now it is working well and helping us to determine the cause of slow requests. It seems like the HTTP requests between the event creator and event persister workers can sometimes be slow - we are not sure of the cause yet, we are working on it but it will mean further performance improvements to message sending.
Next up performance wise is working on sharding the federation sender to improve federation lag. We’ll also try replacing simplejson with stdlib json which seems to be much faster at dumps nowadays.
Finally, we’ve fixed a bug that meant that quarantining media would from time to time include quarantining sticker packs
Other interesting bugs
We fixed a spec compliance bug in fetching remote media raised by our pals in Dendrite-land. We fixed a bug causing federation .well-known requests to fail due to not including the user-agent header. We removed references to six (thanks @ilmari) and finally, fixed a bug that caused stream id to go backwards on the replication stream.
Wondering how quick this weeks synapse release was adopted by homeserver admins? Head over to https://graph.settgast.org/ and see yourself that it only took a little over 2 days for 1.15.1 to become the most used synapse version. I plot hourly distribution of synapse versions there. (Disclaimer: Only collects stats for homeservers that my homeserver sees in any of its rooms, which are around 2000 at the moment)
This is super cool! I love that this has been created, and also how well it reflects on homeserver admins! /me scurries to update to 1.15.1...
This week I worked on server-side key backups and cross-signing - the second most requested features (federation being the first one). Key backups are already working! Take a look:
Cross-signing should be working, but there is a bug where emoji verification gets stuck. I hope we can find the mistakes and finish the PR next week.
Thanks to everyone who supports me on Liberapay or (new!) Bitcoin!
To make the bridge info state events a bit more useful, all my bridges now include the room name and avatar URL in them. The events are also updated whenever the name or avatar changes, and there's a new option to re-send the event to all existing portals so old portals would get it too.
RiotX: Version 0.22.0 has been released on Tuesday, it includes integration manager support, sending stickers, modifying power levels, and lots of other things! See https://github.com/vector-im/riotX-android/releases/tag/v0.22.0 for a complete list of the changes.
This week we've been working on audio and video calls (The PR is in review). We are also trying to improve the performance of the application. We are adding room settings, and we have started to work on the migration Riot-Android -> RiotX.
PS check out Valere trying the new features:
Arch Linux (AUR) package for Revolution - a Riot fork by ponies.im
After some slow progress, rumatui, the rust command line chat client, is usable by anyone. You no longer need an account or have previously joined rooms. Registration and room search have been implemented! Using left/right arrow keys from the login screen will toggle to registration. Once registered hitting the left arrow will bring up the room search window. After typing your search term hit Enter and select the room to join by pressing Ctrl-d.
For the brave who would like to give it a trycargo install --git <https://github.com/DevinR528/rumatui> --branch room-search.
Added since last update
Room search is now available
Public rooms can be joined from the room search window
A user can register from the new register window
This features complete User Interactive Authentication by opening a web browser
Message edits are shown
When markdown is part of the message they are properly formatted
Reactions display under the respective message
Redaction events are handled for reactions (emoji) and messages
"Basically usable" is a standard we can all aspire to for our projects and endeavours.
This week, we worked on the new UX for cross-signing and secure backup. In parallel, we continued to improve the new push implementation. We are very closed to complete the two features.
This week we had an off-cycle 1.6.5 release to fix registration on some homeservers when email validation is required. After that, we've made a 1.6.6 RC including:
Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE (with the notable exception being device verification for now) and intends to be full featured and nice to look at
We released 0.7.2, which was a bit more messy than we would have liked...
As with every release we are currently working through the new bug reports. :D
I started working on SSSS and online key backup support. For this I wrote my own base64 and base58 encoders. As a result of this we dropped libsodium as a dependency, which should make Nheko a bit easier to package or build. It's also fun to write base conversions, although 58 is a horrible base!
From the changelog:
Reactions
React to a message with an emoji! 🎉
Reactions are shown below a message in a small bubble with a counter.
By clicking on that, others can add to the reaction count.
It may help you celebrating a new Nheko Release or react with a 👎 to a failed build to express your frustration.
This uses a new emoji picker. The picker will be improved in the near future (better scrolling, sections, favorites, recently used or similar) and then probably replace the current picker.
Support for tagging rooms [tag]
Assign custom tags to rooms from the context menu in the room list.
This allows filtering rooms via the group list. This puts you in a focus mode showing only the selected tags.
You can assign multiple tags to group rooms however you like.
SSO Login
With this you can now login on servers, that only provide SSO.
Just enter any mxid on the server. Nheko will figure out that you need to use SSO and redirect your browser to the login page.
Complete the login in your browser and Nheko should automatically log you in.
Presence
Shows online status of the people you are talking to.
You can define a custom status message to tell others what you are currently up to.
The status message appears next to the usernames in the timeline.
Your server needs to have presence enabled for this to work.
after a couple of setbacks that didn't let us to make the releases earlier, the Quotient project has finally made two new releases:
GTAD (the piece of code magically producing readable C++ code from a Swagger API description) has achieved version 0.7 (https://github.com/KitsuneRal/gtad/releases/tag/v0.7.0) adding a few tricks in order to make...
...libQuotient 0.6 beta2 (https://github.com/quotient-im/libQuotient/releases/tag/0.6-beta2) rely entirely on the upstream matrix-doc specification, rather than a soft fork closely following the main sources! From now on it's "upstream first", in a sense that the original matrix-doc will be used to build Quotient codebase. Let's see how often it breaks ;)
In other news from the last few weeks:
some housekeeping and deprecation work in the API has been done in preparation to getting User Interactive Authentication along the next (post-0.6) release cycle of libQuotient.
also thanks to the updated code generator, the CS API code has been optimised, consolidating more code in the header files and making data deserialisation lazy; this helped significantly reduce compilation times, and runtime performance also improved a bit.
the number of configurations tested by CI has been extended, allowing to chase down a few more bugs that managed to go under the radar before.
when used with new enough Qt, CBOR is used to cache data locally - entirely transparently for clients.
Expect more news in the coming weeks, including continued work on matrix: URI proposal and its implementation in Quotient.
This week in ruma-events' Google Summer of Code project, after trying out the new Any*Event enums matrix-rust-sdk, we found a few big flaws. There was no easy way to go from StateEvent<AnyStateEventContent> to StateEvent<SpecificEventContent>, the other issue was one could create a StateEvent with differing content and prev_content fields using the AnyStateEventContent enum. The 0.22 ruma-events will be similar to the existing API; each event type has a corresponding event enum variant.
There were a few minor fixes during the week also. Unknown field deserialization is fixed, allowing deserialization of a JSON blob that has extra fields which are ignored. Custom events are now present in the Any*EventContent enums, although now they have to be moved up to be included in Any*Event enums. Benchmarks for deserialization have been added and used to increase performance.
Polyjuice Client, a Matrix library for Elixir, had a new release. This release fixes syncs, which apparently were completely broken in the last release (whoops). The wizarding community also welcomes a new contributor, Pierre de Lacroix.
I heard that you people like IoT?! With the Mozilla WebThings Matrix Adapter your Raspberry Pi sends you messages about your home. Want a log of when the front door has been opened? Need a low battery alert for your IoT devices? With the Mozilla IoT gateway and this adapter, you can send these events to a Matrix room of your choice!
Ever since m.room.aliases was replaced with alt_aliases, there hasn't really been any way to find aliases on other servers, since most room admins don't bother finding and publishing alternate aliases. To help solve that problem, I made a maubot plugin to let users publish alternate aliases in rooms: https://github.com/maubot/altalias
By default it lets users publish aliases with the same localpart as any already published alias. If that behavior is sufficient, you can simply invite it to a room and give it permissions to send m.room.canonical_alias events. Alternatively, it can be configured to allow aliases that match specific regexes.
Once it's set up, users can create a local alias and use !altalias publish <their alias> to publish it. The bot will make sure the alias points to the right room, check that the localpart is allowed and then add it to alt_aliases.
I have it running at @alias:maunium.net and I've added it to all my rooms already. Other rooms are also free to use that instance.
As of https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/89327 a go-neb module was added to nixos and will soon be available on nixos-unstable and in the 20.09 release. You can use it to declaratively install and configure go-neb matrix bots on nixos. I use it for prometheus alertmanager alerts and it works really cool! Thx to hexa- who did most of the work on it.
opsdroid 0.19 has been released, not many matrix specific features in this release, just making it slightly easier to get a connector or database instance by name. However, this release paves the way for the merge of the pull request transitioning opsdroid to use the matrix-nio Python library, so the next release should be packed full of matrix stuff 😀
Dept of Ping 🏓
Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server. Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.
Rank
Hostname
Median MS
1
fairydust.space
384.5
2
maescool.be
390
3
gottliebtfreitag.de
453
4
construct.grin.hu
610
5
aragon.sh
639.5
6
privacytools.io
670
7
matrix.vgorcum.com
734
8
envs.net
756
9
settgast.org
865
10
intothecyber.space
1005
That's all I know 🏁
Thanks to Alexander and Nico for their help editing this edition.
See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!
Regular readers of TWIM may be familiar with the Decentralized Systems and Network Services Research Group at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, who have been busy over the last few years analysing Matrix from an independent academic point of view. The work started in 2018 with Florian Jacob’s DSN Traveler spidering project, resulting in the Glimpse of the Matrix paper analysing Matrix’s scale and room/server distribution (at least as it was back then).
Now, the new paper is an absolutely fascinating deep dive analysis into State Resolution v2 - the algorithm at the heart of Matrix which defines how servers merge together their potentially conflicting copies of a given room, such that everyone ends up eventually with a consistent view… even in the face of bad actors. This means that Matrix effectively implements a decentralised access control system - ensuring that users stay banned, and only users with permission can ban, etc. You can see the slides below, and read the full paper here. The video of Florian’s talk from SACMAT should be published shortly.
To give some context from the Matrix side: designing and implementing State Resolution v2 back in 2018 was a bit of a mission. Our original v1 implementation had some bugs which meant that the result of the merge could unexpectedly favour historical state over the current state (so called ‘state resets’) - thus giving an attacker a way to maliciously revert the state of the room. In v2 we thought much more carefully about the algorithm, considering state present in one version of the room but not the other as a conflict, separating and applying access control events from regular events, and adding additional ordering of the state in the room by considering events in the context of their authorisation chain (the ‘auth DAG’). The end result is that we feel confident in v2 State Res, and we haven’t seen any problems with it in the wild since we shipped it in July 2018.
However: state resolution is not intuitive at first - for instance, when you merge two versions of a room together, you treat the state events as unordered sets… even though they are ordered in the context of the room DAG. The reason is that state res needs to work even if you don’t have a copy of the whole room DAG (otherwise you’d have to download way too much data to participate in a large room). Another example is the sequence in which orderings are then applied to the state events - and how that interacts with re-authorising those events, to stop malicious ones creeping in. In the core team, we’ve end up describing it several different ways to try to help folks understand: first Erik’s original MSC1442, then uhoreg’s literary Haskell implementation, then the terse reference version in the Spec itself, and most recently Neil Alexander’s State Resolution v2 for the Hopelessly Unmathematical.
As a result we are very excited and happy that Florian and the DSN team have now published the first ever independent in-depth analysis of the algorithm, particularly in the context of decentralised access control (i.e. enforcing bans, power levels, etc). We’re pleasantly surprised that apparently “To the best of our knowledge, Matrix is the only system that implements access control based on an eventually consistent partial order without finality and without a consensus algorithm”.
Even better, the DSN team found some remaining thinkos in Synapse’s implementation and the Matrix specification, which could have caused resolution results to diverge from other implementations, specifically:
All of these have now been fixed in Synapse and the latest versions of the spec (room v6), and we’d like to sincerely thank Florian and Luca for rapidly and responsibly disclosing the issues to us. In other words: this research is directly improving Matrix, and it’s even more exciting that the stated future work for the DSN team is to work on a formal verification for the security of Matrix’s authorisation rules and state resolution. This stuff is tough, as anyone who’s played with TLA+ will know, and we are incredibly glad that the research community is helping out to formalise and hopefully prove that State Res v2 is as good as we think it is.
We should stress that DSN’s work is completely independent of The Matrix.org Foundation or anyone else building on the protocol; we’re just writing about it here because we think it’s incredibly cool and deserves the attention of the whole Matrix ecosystem.
Thanks again to Florian and the team - we look forward to seeing what comes next!
Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.
In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we're sticking with the same three from last week: MSC2366 (verification flows), MSC2403 (knocking), and MSC2630 (SAS security).
In possibly more exciting news, the Spec Core Team has decided to start separating the scattered casual implementation tips and notes in the spec out and putting them in a series of implementation guides! These will take the form of gitbook-style things, and will initially feature front-to-back implementation guides for a generic Matrix client and homeserver. For more details to provide feedback, check out the associated MSC2618!
Dept of GSoC 🎓
This is the second week of the coding phase of GSoC 2020. Find updates from the students below:
The port from matrix-python-sdk to matrix-nio is almost completed. Sending and receiving most events works properly. Changes are expected be merged in a few days. This PR itself doesn't implement E2EE, that will be a different PR
Alongside that I've been working on implementing E2EE with nio which is partially done, sending and receiving messages works so far. some changes to the MatrixStore interaction and testing is left.
Implementing end-to-end encryption for go-neb turns out to be a lot easier than expected thanks to the https://github.com/tulir/mautrix library, which contains out of the box e2ee support!
The first week of GSoC was spent switching go-neb's usage of gomatrix for mautrix, which was easy as the latter is a fork of the former. This caused a pretty big PR that touched most of go-neb's files, although the changes were simple and easy to review. The PR was merged shortly after into go-neb.
During the second week, it was time to add some basic e2ee support to go-neb. This was complicated slightly due to the bot's ability to create multiple clients and its treatment of /sync responses, however in the end e2ee is now working.
The code is still of course a mess and session keys are often lost in the void. The code will be cleaned up and tested further next week, bugs will be (hopefully) fixed and another PR will be submitted to go-neb then to officially add e2ee support!
Matrix has enormous potential to be used in many different use cases be it embedded chat rooms, comments section, chat boxes, etc. This project aims to fill that niche by providing an easy to use and easy to deploy client for users to embed on their webpages.
The client would mesh well wherever it is embedded by providing a postMessage interface to allow the parent webpage to interact with the client and dynamically modify it whenever needed (For example:- A comments section that is always the same theme as its parent webpage).
Features
As of now, the following features have been added (with more on the way)
List of joined rooms that can be selected
Live room timeline events
Support for image-based messages
Message composer and ability to send messages to a room
Dark and light themes for the client
Changeable highlight colors
Toggleable room header, room timeline, and message composer components
postMessage interface for sending commands from the parent window
Currently, I'm working on adding more options to the postMessage interface as well as adding more interactivity to the client itself.
This week in ruma-events' Google Summer of Code project, I was able to finish the macros needed to generate the event content enums and trait implementations required for events. I started by defining the generic event structs (state, message, etc.) and manually writing the Serialize and Deserialize implementations. Over the next few days, this was moved into a custom derive macro called Event. The derive now implements all necessary traits with appropriate bounds, so a StateEvent<C> can not contain any ephemeral event content and so forth. I have removed the raw mod and related FromRaw and TryFromRaw traits, moving the validation into the deserialization and constructor for the few types that needed it. On the event content side of things, a function like procedural macro was used to allow declaring the enum using Matrix event type identifiers.
Much of this week's work has been maintenance-related with refactoring, cleaning up etc.
Key fetching/expiry behaviour has been fixed, improving the reliability of federation.
The monolith and component setup has now been refactored.
A number of unused internal APIs have now been removed.
Other internal roomserver APIs have been streamlined.
We have also started building an Yggdrasil-powered P2P demo (as opposed to the previous demos built using libp2p) and even includes support for embedding Riot Web in the single binary. It's not very stable/usable yet but there will be more news on that to follow within the next couple of weeks.
We have also started building and releasing Docker images for Dendrite on Docker Hub for those who want to use Docker to test Dendrite deployment.
Welcome back! This week I focused my efforts on better error handling. My goal was that every problem would be forwarded to the client (e.g. InternalServerError response) and also be logged. Yesterday I merged the giant PR this resulted in. Hopefully this will make Conduit easier to debug in the future.
Here are some other things I finished this week:
User-interactive authentication (e.g. you need to type your password again if you want to delete devices)
Config option to disable registration
I also found the problem with Riot not showing notifications for new messages and created a bug report. With a few tweaks, I managed to solve this on my account and now mentions, DMs and more play the notification sound (it also works on Riot X!).
@gnieto fixed a bug that prevented Riot from loading history when you join a room and @PublicByte implemented the /whoami endpoint.
This week we shipped 1.15.0, edited highlights include:
Features
Add admin APIs to allow server admins to manage users' devices. Contributed by @dklimpel. (#7481)
Add an option to disable autojoining rooms for guest accounts. (#6637)
For SAML authentication, add the ability to pass email addresses to be added to new users' accounts via SAML attributes. Contributed by Christopher Cooper. (#7385)
Add support for generating thumbnails for WebP images. Previously, users would see an empty box instead of preview image. Contributed by @WGH-. (#7586)
Support the standardized m.login.sso user-interactive authentication flow. (#7630)
Bugfixes
Allow new users to be registered via the admin API even if the monthly active user limit has been reached. Contributed by @dklimpel. (#7263)
Fix a bug in automatic user creation during first time login with m.login.jwt. Regression in v1.6.0. Contributed by @olof. (#7585)
Fix a bug causing the cross-signing keys to be ignored when resyncing a device list. (#7594)
Fix bug where returning rooms for a group would fail if it included a room that the server was not in. (#7599)
Fix duplicate key violation when persisting read markers. (#7607)
Prevent an entire iteration of the device list resync loop from failing if one server responds with a malformed result. (#7609)
Pass device information through to the login endpoint when using the login fallback. (#7629)
Advertise the m.login.token login flow when OpenID Connect is enabled. (#7631)
Fix bug in account data replication stream. (#7656)
Internal Changes
Improve query performance for fetching state from a PostgreSQL database. Contributed by @ilmari. (#7567)
Speed up processing of federation stream RDATA rows. (#7584)
Refactor Ratelimiter to limit the amount of expensive config value accesses. (#7595)
Clean up exception handling in SAML2ResponseResource. (#7614)
Check if the localpart of a Matrix ID is reserved for guest users earlier in the registration flow, as well as when responding to requests to /register/available. (#7625)
Aside from that we continue out push towards improving performance both in terms of sharding workers but also improving tools to manage disk space usage. Specifically this week and next we are looking at db tuning and sharding the media repo worker. We are also noticing that the typing handler is chewing more CPU than would be expected. It could be a good candidate for moving away from the master process.
More broadly we are changing the defaults for notifications and making changes to support a more general overhaul of notifications.
Finally we are looking at how to not only delete messages after a certain time period, but also how to delete the associated media (which becomes difficult when considering e2e content along side long lived content such as avatars and sticker packs).
For more detail on what is coming next, take a look at our public task board.
The WhatsApp bridge can now bridge location messages from WhatsApp to m.location on Matrix and contact messages as vCard files (until Matrix gets a native contact message type).
It also now encrypts media properly when bridging messages in encrypted rooms. I had apparently missed that when adding end-to-bridge encryption earlier.
mautrix-facebook got a few improvements and bugfixes:
Added timestamp massaging
Added support for bridging video and file messages to Matrix
Fixed backfilling with SQLite (it didn't work due to the python timezone mess, fix contributed by erdnaxeli)
Improved options for automatic reconnecting. The bridge should now work fairly reliably when using all the auto-reconnect options and backfilling, it only breaks if facebook decides you've been hacked
Since MSC2190 and the related Synapse PR aren't moving much, all my bridges now generate appservice registration files with the workaround. The workaround is needed to avoid patching synapse or using other hacks, and I decided to enable it by default as many people had problems related to having to apply it manually.
The WhatsApp, Facebook and Hangouts bridges now have an option to use double puppeting to disable notifications when backfilling. It can be useful if you want to copy chat history to Matrix, but don't want to be spammed with hundreds of notifications while it's happening.
To get things ready for NovaChat launch, we added a bunch of new features to a fork of the mx-puppet-slack client that Sorunome created. You can try it out here. We'll be pushing our changes upstream soon.
New features:
message backfilling at room creation and reconnect
syncs read status to/from Slack.com
adds all users to bridged room during initial creation
automatically bridges all channels and DMs that you are part of during initial setup, so you don't have to wait for a message to arrive for it to appear in Matrix
My matrix-sms-bridge got an large update, which introduced an automated way to create and write messages to telephone numbers via commands in a bot room. See the docs for more information, how to use it.
a set of Matrix bridges configured to run on a private server called a bridgebox
Matrix bridges are awesome but generally require you to run own homeserver. NovaChat removes that restriction, without sacrificing security and privacy. Your remote chat network credentials never leave your bridgebox, and messages are encrypted* on the bridgebox before being sent to the NovaChat homeserver.
*Encryption is currently enabled on Telegram/FB/Hangouts/Whatsapp bridges, mx-puppet-bridges coming shortly)
Fancy new UI, heavily inspired by Telegram. See photo below or see it in action
Easy graphical bridge set up (no more fiddling with config files)
Reliable bridging, with delivery confirmations and bridge disconnect warnings
Includes 8 pre-configured bridges: Facebook/Whatsapp/Hangouts/Telegram/Slack/Instagram/Twitter/Skype. Planning to add more soon, or submit a PR!
Works on Mac OS, Linux and Windows
You don't need to be technical to use NovaChat, it's designed to Just WorkTM. If you need help setting up a bridgebox, we are offering hosting and maintenance for USD $5 per month.
The vast majority of this software has been created by the talented tulir and dm0141. I personally am a terrible coder (you can tell which parts I did), but I do have experience building products and teams, and I'm excited to begin working in the Matrix universe. I wrote recently about how I believe Matrix is the Universal Communication Bus! Thanks goes to Sorunome for creating the mx-puppet-bridges!
We're developing the whole project in the open (though not all components are open source), check the issue backlog :)
Want to help? We're hiring Matrix developer to work on the project with us. Send me a message if you're interested! Particularly looking for a React dev to help with frontend on nova-web.
Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE (with the notable exception being device verification for now) and intends to be full featured and nice to look at
nheko 0.7.2 is ready for release. Here's the summary of changes:
Highlights
Reactions
React to a message with an emoji! 🎉
Reactions are shown below a message in a small bubble with a counter.
By clicking on that, others can add to the reaction count.
It may help you celebrating a new Nheko Release or react with a 👎 to a failed build to express your frustration.
This uses a new emoji picker. The picker will be improved in the near future (better scrolling, sections, favorites, recently used or similar) and then probably replace the current picker.
Support for tagging rooms [tag]
Assign custom tags to rooms from the context menu in the room list.
This allows filtering rooms via the group list. This puts you in a focus mode showing only the selected tags.
You can assign multiple tags to group rooms however you like.
SSO Login
With this you can now login on servers, that only provide SSO.
Just enter any mxid on the server. Nheko will figure out that you need to use SSO and redirect your browser to the login page.
Complete the login in your browser and Nheko should automatically log you in.
Features
Support for showing users presence and status message as well as setting your own status message"
Respect exif rotation of images
An italian translation (contributed by Lorenzo Ancora)
Optional alerts in your taskbar (contributed by z33ky)
Optional bigger emoji only messages in the timeline (contributed by lkito)
Optional hover feedback on messages (contributed by lkito)
/roomnick to change your displayname in a single room.
Preliminary support for showing inline images.
Warn about unencrypted messages in encrypted rooms.
Improvements
perf: Use less CPU to sort the room list.
Limit size of replies. This currently looks a bit rough, but should improve in the future with a gradient or at some other transition.
perf: Only clean out old messages from the database every 500 syncs. (There is usually more than one sync every second)
Improve the login and register masks a bit with hints and validation.
Descriptions for settings (contributed by lkito)
A visual indicator, that nheko is fetching messages and improved scrolling (contributed by Lasath Fernando)
Bugfixes
Fix not being able to join rooms
Fix scale factor setting
Buildfixes against gcc10 and Qt5.15 (missing includes)
Settings now apply immediately again after changing them (only exception should be the scale factor)
Join messages should never have empty texts now
Timeline should now fail to render less often on platforms with native sibling windows.
Don't rescale images on every frame on highdpi screens.
This week, we continued to iterate on the implementation of the new push notification service thanks to user feedbacks. Those feedbacks also show that the app uses less battery.
On login, this is now possible to recover your cross-signing and your key backup from your recovery passphrase or key.
libolm 3.1.5 has been released. It mainly collects the various build system and documentation fixes that have accumulated since the last release. It also includes a new wasm build target (which apparently is used for running matrix-rust-sdk in the browser), as well as TypeScript definitions for the JavaScript bindings.
Ruma
Ruma is a Rust project to create a comprehensive set of APIs for Matrix. Previously there was a Ruma homeserver project.
Most of the work this past week was on ruma-events, for more on that see the GSoC section! Devin got far enough with that so we now know it all works out and can replace the previous ruma-events API. When that was clear, ruma-events was also merged into our new monorepo; now the only remaining crate to be merged is ruma-client (where I'm also waiting for some pending changes).
Dept of Ops 🛠
Matrix Helm chart
Kubernetes Helm chart for easily deploying a Matrix homeserver stack
Version 2 of my Matrix Helm chart is out! It now allows for running a federating homeserver without needing an external load balancer for the federation service, potentially lowering costs (depending on your cloud provider), and definitely reducing the headache of managing TLS certificates!
dacruz21/matrix-chart is a Kubernetes Helm chart for easily deploying a Matrix homeserver stack, complete with Synapse, Riot, VoIP calls, bridges, and other backing services. It's ideal for anyone looking to run a large homeserver, or for corporate environments where security is paramount!
Anyone running a federating instance of Synapse will likely have seen this: Synapse is database-hungry. It tends to take a lot of space. In this post, I'm documenting how I shrunk my homeserver database from 100GB to a little under 8GB, during a long maintenance cleanup. https://levans.fr/shrink-synapse-database.html
Very pleased to see this, I have a feeling I'm going to be running it in the near future...
There's a new room "Matrix Outreach" #matrix-outreach:matrix.org for folks interested in "Helping each other explain and promote Matrix to the public: creating slogans, introduction leaflets, info-graphics, elevator pitch, Wikipedia articles, and so on."
Dept of Ping 🏓
Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server. Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.
Rank
Hostname
Median MS
1
fairydust.space
391
2
envs.net
443.5
3
maunium.net
506
4
tum.de
603.5
5
neko.dev
822
6
maclemon.at
887
7
cyllos.me
916
8
shortestpath.dev
1072.5
9
settgast.org
1079
10
maescool.be
1324
That's all I know 🏁
See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!
We continue our push to improve performance across the board. Factoring out event persistence into a separate worker pointed the way to a host of small but collectively important improvements. Expect further changes in coming releases.
Aside from that the admin API continues to grow (this time device management) and we have improved device list syncing to aid e2ee reliability.
We are receiving an increasing number of high quality PRs from the community, please keep them coming. Special thanks to cg505, dklimpel, WGH, olof and ilmari
Get 1.15.0 from github or any of the sources mentioned at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/INSTALL.md.
Changelog since v1.14.0
Synapse 1.15.0 (2020-06-11)
No significant changes.
Synapse 1.15.0rc1 (2020-06-09)
Features
Advertise support for Client-Server API r0.6.0 and remove related unstable feature flags. (#6585)
Add an option to disable autojoining rooms for guest accounts. (#6637)
For SAML authentication, add the ability to pass email addresses to be added to new users' accounts via SAML attributes. Contributed by Christopher Cooper. (#7385)
Add admin APIs to allow server admins to manage users' devices. Contributed by @dklimpel. (#7481)
Add support for generating thumbnails for WebP images. Previously, users would see an empty box instead of preview image. Contributed by @WGH-. (#7586)
Support the standardized m.login.sso user-interactive authentication flow. (#7630)
Bugfixes
Allow new users to be registered via the admin API even if the monthly active user limit has been reached. Contributed by @dklimpel. (#7263)
Fix email notifications not being enabled for new users when created via the Admin API. (#7267)
Fix str placeholders in an instance of PrepareDatabaseException. Introduced in Synapse v1.8.0. (#7575)
Fix a bug in automatic user creation during first time login with m.login.jwt. Regression in v1.6.0. Contributed by @olof. (#7585)
Fix a bug causing the cross-signing keys to be ignored when resyncing a device list. (#7594)
Fix metrics failing when there is a large number of active background processes. (#7597)
Fix bug where returning rooms for a group would fail if it included a room that the server was not in. (#7599)
Fix duplicate key violation when persisting read markers. (#7607)
Prevent an entire iteration of the device list resync loop from failing if one server responds with a malformed result. (#7609)
Fix exceptions when fetching events from a remote host fails. (#7622)
Make synctl restart start synapse if it wasn't running. (#7624)
Pass device information through to the login endpoint when using the login fallback. (#7629)
Advertise the m.login.token login flow when OpenID Connect is enabled. (#7631)
Fix bug in account data replication stream. (#7656)
Improved Documentation
Update the OpenBSD installation instructions. (#7587)
Clean up exception handling in SAML2ResponseResource. (#7614)
Check that all asynchronous tasks succeed and general cleanup of MonthlyActiveUsersTestCase and TestMauLimit. (#7619)
Convert get_user_id_by_threepid to async/await. (#7620)
Switch to upstream dh-virtualenv rather than our fork for Debian package builds. (#7621)
Update CI scripts to check the number in the newsfile fragment. (#7623)
Check if the localpart of a Matrix ID is reserved for guest users earlier in the registration flow, as well as when responding to requests to /register/available. (#7625)
Minor cleanups to OpenID Connect integration. (#7628)
Attempt to fix flaky test: PhoneHomeStatsTestCase.test_performance_100. (#7634)
Fix typos of m.olm.curve25519-aes-sha2 and m.megolm.v1.aes-sha2 in comments, test files. (#7637)
Convert user directory, state deltas, and stats handlers to async/await. (#7640)
Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.
In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we've still got MSC2366 (verification flows) on our plate, but we're removing MSC2399 (UISI messaging) as it just needs one more final tick. We're adding MSC2403 (knocking) in its place.
Mascarene is a quite new homeserver implementation project started a few months ago. Now it's time to introduce it.
Mascarene is written in Scala, runs on JVM and relies on Akka actor model. Out of the box it provides features like efficient streaming I/O, clustering and live data distribution. Data are backed in a PostgreSQL database.
The project is in early stage but already provides a few endpoints which make Mascarene able to talk to Riot.
You can test it at https://snapshot.mascarene.org. You should be able to register, login, create a room and talk to yourself.
Current work is focused on client API implementation; federation or e2ee will come later.
Welcome back! This week I went through the whole Client-Server API and wrote down everything that is still missing from Conduit. You can find issues for all of them in the milestone for Conduit 1.0. This should make it more easy for contributors to find something to work on and gives a lot more structure to the repo (maybe I also did it, because it's so satisfying to close issues and see the milestone percentage go up 😛).
Some of the issues I could already close this week include:
Implement redaction
Implement loading the message someone replied to (/context)
Fix bugs with notifications
Don't send typing events when nothing happened
Bundle typing events into one EDU
Don't send notification counts every /sync
Implement heroes
As you can tell, a lot of work is starting to go into smaller improvements, which is a good thing, because it means most of the core work is already done!
Thanks to my supporters on Liberapay (Take a look, I improved it 🙂).
This week in Synapse land we have been focusing on bug fixes especially SSO and soft logout.
We also spent some time thinking about how to further improve performance for large scale deployments (like matrix.org). In short this will mean sharding contested workers such as the media repo worker, the federation sender and the federation reader. We also want to remove some more functionality from the master process because it is still sitting at about 80% and we’d like some more head room. We'd also like to fix up the state compressor so it can easily be run as a background progress to save on disk space, this will benefit all installations big and small. Finally we want to speed up joins over federation. Exciting times.
Next week, more of the same and we should start on some of the perf items. Also look out for changes to notification defaults.
Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib
Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go
Server signing keys which have passed their validity period are now re-requested and updated properly, increasing reliability of federation substantially
Federated room joins have been significantly sped up by requesting missing auth events inline when verifying room state, rather than repeating the entire verification for each missing event
Local send-to-device support has been added (federated send-to-device coming soon)
A lot of code clean-up has taken place (with more to come), including cleaning up the internal APIs and the component bases
Decoding of room version 3 event IDs in request URLs has been improved
Inbound federation requests now interrupt backoff intervals on outbound sends
A new internal API exists now for interrupting backoff intervals on the federation sender
The federated /devices endpoint now returns in the correct format
Public rooms are now sorted by their member count
Only our own aliases are stored in the public rooms directory now
gomatrixserverlib is now responsible for marking room versions as supported/stable
Spec-compliant transactions are now sent to the appservice component
File URIs for SQLite databases are now set up using common functions
Handling registration for a user that already exists has been fixed (thanks S7evinK!)
Dendrite can now be configured to use a HTTP proxy server for outbound HTTP (thanks dr-bonez!)
Sytest compliance:
Client-server APIs: 36%
Server-server APIs: 35%
In other news, Kegan wrote a post on how p2p.riot.im works, including Dendrite's journey to SQLite and WebAssembly!
Additionally! You may have already read about v0.1.1 of the P2P Matrix demo - this is a big update, with local storage, room alias handling, federation improvements and more!
mautrix-facebook got support for backfilling history when creating portals and backfilling missed messages when connecting. There's also an option to periodically reconnect to potentially fix the bug where Facebook decides that you don't get messages anymore, but doesn't actually disconnect you.
I had apparently forgotten to implement bridge information in the whatsapp bridge when I implemented it in my other bridges, but that mistake is now corrected. I also fixed a bug with encryption where it would generate too many one-time keys and cause messages to be undecryptable. Finally, mautrix-whatsapp had its first release this week since it's working reasonably well now.
Eager to test the keytar feature (pickle key stored in OS secret storage) with Riot Web? Support landed in radical-native v0.1beta13, which uses Rust keytar bindings under the hood. Testing requires the latest and greatest of Riot Web, so riot.im/develop might be the place to see it in action
RiotX v0.21.0 has been released on May 28th. It adds support to identity server configuration and e-mail/phone binding and unbinding. It's also now possible to switch between languages inside the app and to display the list of attachments (media and file) of a room. A new setting has been also added to hide redacted (deleted) events in the timeline. As Riot-Android SAS v2 is also included in this release. Also formatted_body for m.notice and m.emote are now taken into account.
This week we were still working on implementing VoIP (audio and video call). Support for integration manager, widgets and sending stickers has been merged to develop.
Many new features are coming soon, stay tuned!
Riot-Android: Version 0.9.12 has been released on May 20th. I forgot to mention it the TWIM of last week. It contains a fix for favorite rooms vanishing and also the SAS v2 implementation (new key agreement method).
This week, we finalised our work around the iOS13 SDK. The coming public TestFlight (0.12.2) is the result of this work. It comes with a lot of changes including a full rewrite of the push handling codebase, trying to find solutions to make matrix e2ee compatible with iOS Notification Service Extension. Most of these changes are unfortunately invisible for end users. Please report any issues. Note this is safe to switch between this TF and 0.11.5.
In parallel, we started to implement the cross-signing bootstrap and the recovery management. The UX of this is going to be refined on Riot-Web and RiotX-Android. Riot-iOS will implement the refined UX directly.
Riot Web
A glossy Matrix collaboration client for the web. https://riot.im
For context, Safe Support Chat is an embeddable chatbox built on Matrix with cool features such as end-to-end encryption support to enable individuals to seek support with organisations that provide it. It was initially built for the OCRCC (Ontario Coalition of Rape Crisis Centres) in order to allow survivors of sexual violence to communicate and seek help safely with OCRCC facilitators.
A new version of the terminal-based federation tester has been released. The current version 1.11 should now cover the entire server discovery process including scenarios with a .well-known configuration without a port, but with a DNS SRV entry.
The script relies on bash, curl, jq and openssl. It has been tested on linux but should also work on *bsd and macos.
Hi, I've build FLAP to help other self-host multiple free software. FLAP can currently help you to easily setup Synapse, Riot, Nextcloud, SOGo and Jitsi all with SSO and low maintenance needs. Feel free to give it a try !
an imperial <--> metric unit converter for common conversational units
a configurable search and link for issues/pulls that responds to any message containing something in the format of jf#123 or jf #1234
a configurable general purpose URL linker that responds to messages containing things such as docs@hwa or link @troubleshooting (both sides of the @ are configurable)
There are plans to enable group pings, get a help command that can be limited to function only in a specific room, and more in the works so be sure to check back soon!
matrix-reminder-bot bot to remind you about things. Supports reminding an individual in a room or the whole room itself. Also supports setting alarms, which will continue to sound periodically until silenced.
Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server. Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.
This week I've been chatting with conference organisers making really
interesting virtual event plans, and I'm bursting to share some of the Matrix
integration plans, hopefully more details coming soon.
For those who Hubzilla or Zap or ActivityPub or Friendica or Diaspora, there is now a Hubzilla forum for all things Matrix: https://elsmussols.net/channel/matrix
That's all I know 🏁
See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!
TL;DR: we shipped a major update (v0.1.1) to https://p2p.riot.im - fire up a desktop Chrome or Firefox in not-private-browsing mode and give it a go!
Hi folks,
As many know by now, a few of us have been working away since mid-December on experimenting with running Matrix in a peer-to-peer architecture - one where every user has absolute total autonomy and ownership of their conversations, because the only place their conversations exist is on the devices they own.
In some ways this is the logical end goal of Matrix: our aim has always been to empower users to have full control over their communication rather than being beholden to any given service provider, and in a P2P world we completely return power over secure communication to the people.
Why P2P?
P2P Matrix is about more than just letting users store their own conversations: it can also avoid dependencies on the Internet itself by working over local networks, mesh networks, or situations where the Internet has been cut off. Even more interestingly, without homeservers, there is nowhere for metadata to accumulate about who is talking to who, and when - which is a legitimate complaint about today’s Matrix network, given the homeservers of all users in a given conversation necessarily have to store that conversation’s metadata. P2P also lets us radically simplify signup for new users if they don’t have to pick a server to get going - and we avoid the unintentional centralisation of users piling onto public servers.
P2P also forces us to solve many of the hardest remaining problems in Matrix: e.g multi-homed accounts, given multi-device P2P requires your account to exist in multiple places. This in turn unlocks high availability and geo-redundancy for accounts on today’s Matrix network (imagine having a primary and backup homeserver that magically did the right thing!), as well as account portability, and thus also vhosting and load-balancing accounts between servers, and even improved GDPR compliance (for if your user IDs are ephemeral they are no longer personally identifying information baked into your Matrix rooms). We’ll also need better safety mechanisms to avoid folks exploiting the anonymous nature of the network for abuse, accelerating the work we’re already doing for today’s Matrix network.
The way we’ve been approaching P2P is the “hamfisted but genius” approach of taking homeservers and running them on the client, alongside or within your Matrix client - meaning that there are literally no changes required for any Matrix client to talk P2P Matrix, and so P2P Matrix can instantly benefit from all the work which has gone into Riot and other apps. As a result, P2P is also a huge motivator towards developing much smaller homeservers which can run efficiently clientside (e.g. Dendrite!) - which is of course great news for Matrix as a whole. It also forces us to develop more scalable routing algorithms (as you don’t want your client to have to talk to every other device in a room every time it sends a message!) and also spurs development of low bandwidth Matrix transports (as you don’t want the additional chatter of talking to multiple peers to consume all your bandwidth). Finally, it forces us to really ruggedize federation, given nodes are constantly appearing and disappearing, giving the federation much more of a stress test than we see with today’s relatively static homeservers.
P2P in Practice
So, P2P has been acting as fuel for a lot of our longer term Matrix work over the last few months. There have been three main experiments so far: at FOSDEM we showed off running our next-gen Dendrite homeserver running clientside using HTTP over libp2p as the transport. We also highlighted Timothée Floure’s project at EPFL experimenting with Synapse talking P2P CoAP over yggdrasil as the transport via a proxy.
Most recently, however, we’ve been experimenting with compiling Dendrite down to Web Assembly and running it embedded in Riot Web as a Service Worker, using HTTP over libp2p’s websocket transport (coordinated via a websocket rendezvous server). Architecturally, it looks like this:
Today, we’re shipping a major new alpha (v0.1.1) of this P2P demo up at https://p2p.riot.im (requires desktop Chrome or Firefox in non-private-browsing mode) - which hopefully should give a really usable and concrete taste of the shape of things to come.
The main features are:
Your conversations are now persisted in your browser storage (via IndexedDB), meaning that as long as all the browsers participating in a given conversation don’t clear their local storage, rooms on the P2P network are here to stay!
Your room directory lists all the aliases for all the rooms published by active nodes on the network. Moreover, we now automatically publish a local room alias whenever you join a public room, so that others will be able to discover that room via you, even if the server who originally created the alias has disappeared.
Lots and lots of federation improvements between the nodes - for instance, when a node comes online, others should now automatically detect and send scrollback to it. Invites should work, and there should no longer be any unexpectedly redacted messages.
Finally, please understand that the demo is very likely not what the final version of P2P Matrix will look like - this is just one step in a series of experiments as we investigate the best paths forward :)
What’s next?
For the current demo, there’s still lots of stuff remaining, including:
More federation debugging (and hooking in tardis and writing up everything we’ve learned about implementing federation in Dendrite!)
Making the content repository work in-browser (gotta fill up those IndexedDBs with some GIFs!)
Hooking up E2E Encryption APIs in Dendrite (not that it buys us much in a pure P2P world)
WebRTC transports. Turns out that service workers aren’t allowed to speak WebRTC, so we’ll have to shim through to Riot to speak true peer-to-peer WebRTC data channels rather than relaying all the traffic through the websocket rendezvous server.
Decentralised accounts for multidevice support - reviewing MSC1228 and getting Dendrite supporting multihoming accounts!
Finishing all of Dendrite’s other remaining APIs.
Beyond this, there are some bigger picture questions left to be answered in future experiments.
Firstly: we do not yet have a solution for “store and forward” nodes which can relay messages on behalf of a room if all the participating devices are offline. A first cut will be to run a P2P-capable homeserver server-side for this, but then metadata will start to accumulate server-side for the conversations it hosts. A more interesting approach would be to use a store and forward system which obfuscates who is talking to who, such as a mixnet, and could even provide resistance to network traffic pattern analysis. This is very much an open area of research, but one we are getting into :D
Secondly: we want to experiment more with other transports, and find out which works best for Matrix. Libp2p has some really exciting new stuff in the form of Gossipsub v1.1 - a much smarter routing algorithm for pubsub traffic in libp2p, which David Dias gave us a VIP tour of at the first Open Tech Will Save Us meetup. So we’ll need to restructure our libp2p transport as pubsub to see how it works in practice. Separately, we also want to play with hooking up Yggdrasil (the encrypted overlay network) as a transport as a totally different approach - Yggdrasil will easily let us span different underlying network transports, but comes with different tradeoffs (e.g. no browser support yet). We also want to take a look at the DAT / hypercore / hyperswarm / Cabal ecosystem to see if there’s a match :)
Thirdly and finally: we obviously want to unify the new P2P Matrix network with today’s federated one. The ideal outcome here would be to have a hybrid model, where teams who want their users to have a dedicated homeserver (for availability, IT policies, etc) can continue to have one as they do today - but newbies who have just installed Riot would float around on P2P unless they decided to consciously put down roots on a server or two. Best of all, it would let us turn off the matrix.org homeserver: the best public homeserver is one you run yourself on your own phone ;) The approach we take for linking P2P and today’s Matrix will depend very much on the transport we select for P2P in the long run, but the likelihood is that today’s homeservers will sprout P2P gateways to link the networks.
Conclusion
So, there you have it. P2P Matrix exists, and is developing at an alarming speed - and pushing Dendrite development along with it. Most excitingly, there have been no changes yet to the Matrix spec for P2P at all; we’ve just swapped https for http-over-libp2p as the transport. So all of the work we’ve been doing making Dendrite work in a P2P world has directly translated into making Dendrite work on today’s Matrix too You can now stand up a Dendrite and have it federate pretty reliably with the wider Matrix network, although we’re still rushing through implementing APIs (we’re up to 35% passing sytest coverage - although that 35% does contain most of the important tests :)
Finally, in case you’re worried about why the Matrix core team is off chasing P2P dreams rather than improving Riot’s UX, or implementing Communities, or Extensible Profiles, or working through the MSC backlog etc... in practice only two people (ignoring Matthew) have been working on P2P - Neil Alexander (author of the original FOSDEM demo, Dendrite wrangler and Yggdrasil co-maintainer) and Kegan Dougal (of the original Matrix dev team, one of the original authors of Dendrite, and now wrangling the WASM P2P work too). Huge thanks to Kegan & Neil for pushing P2P forwards - and huge thanks to everyone else on the core team and the wider community for keeping today’s Matrix advancing too!
Hope this has given a tempting glimpse of the shape of things to come. Honestly we never thought we’d get as far as P2P when we started Matrix back in 2014, but it’s really fun to be finally catching up with the future :D
-- Matthew
P.S. You can read more about this from Neil Alexander’s point of view over at his blog (including more thoughts on the potential Yggdrasil demo!)
P.P.S You can read the gory details of the P2P and WASM implementation from Kegan's point of view over at the Dendrite wiki.
Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.
In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we've still got MSC2366 (verification flows) and MSC2399 (UISI messaging), however they are now joined by a third, secret MSC that we'll be working on internally for now :)
Spec releases: Room Version 6, Client-Server r0.6.1, and Federation r0.1.4
Says TravisR:
It's been a little while since we've done a round of spec releases, so we have a bunch of spec releases to share. If you're implementing something from the spec, please have a look at the news: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/05/27/room-version-6-client-server-r-0-6-1-and-federation-r-0-1-4-spec-releases/
As always, any questions about the spec itself can be answered in #matrix-spec:matrix.org, #matrix-dev:matrix.org, or in the various area-specific rooms floating around the federation.
Hello again! This week I worked on access control, which means that private rooms are private and invite-only rooms are invite-only. The public room directory only shows rooms marked as such now.
I also made a milestone to track progress on Conduit 1.0. This release marks the point where Conduit is fully usable as a non-federating homeserver. All features of the client server specification should be implemented, unless they can be seen as optional extensions (e.g. alternative registrations methods like email). Conduit should also be free of all known bugs with those features.
Adding federation on top of the 1.0 release will very likely require breaking changes. This means that the release which brings federation will be 2.0 or later and will require a partial or full database deletion.
The monolith now has a "hybrid" mode that uses the full HTTP APIs instead of short-circuiting
A number of the internal HTTP APIs are now tested fully and have been fixed as a result, which will also improve running a full polylith component deployment
Server keys are now managed by a separate server key API component
Batched sends in the federation sender are now working properly, improving send performance significantly
Error handling in the federation /send endpoint has been tweaked
/get_missing_events now returns events that don't fail signature checks
Federated room joins by room alias now attempt the server specified in the alias much more reliably
The correct room ID is now returned from the PerformJoin API
Much of the room server storage code has been deduplicated
Fixed some bugs in the device database storage code
Sync streams are now managed per-user-per-device, rather than just per-user
We no longer incorrectly default to federated joins in response to local invites
Spec compliance:
Client-Server APIs: 34% (228/672 tests)
Federation APIs: 34% (35/103 tests)
Synapse
Says Neil:
The main news this week is that we switched event persistence away from the matrix.org master process which has made a big difference to overall performance. The impact is best demonstrated by graphing message send times.
We also shipped 1.14.0 which includes OpenId Connect support and improved cache control granularity. It also contains rooms v6.
Next week will be having a think about what to do next for matrix.org performance. Watch this space.
TARDIS (Time Agnostic Room DAG Inspection Service)
I made a TARDIS (Time Agnostic Room DAG Inspection Service) - a simple time-travelling debugger for Room DAGs which plugs into Dendrite's internal APIs to visualise room DAGs. The intention is to provide it as a widget which Riot can use to visualise DAGs for debugging, particularly for P2P Matrix. The time-travel bit is simply that it could let you filter out the newer events to show how the DAG has evolved over time, although that isn't hooked up yet. https://github.com/matrix-org/tardis
With the release of synapse 1.14.0 the avhost image, including jemalloc, mjolnir and coturn has been updated as well, avhost/docker-matrix:v1.14.0, as always the release candidates were uploaded at mvgorcum/docker-matrix:v1.14.0rc1 and rc2
ruma-serde 0.2.2 (an internal dependency) fixed an incomplete part of querystring deserialization, so Conduit (and other future homeservers building on ruma-*-api) can properly handle querystrings in which parameters are repeated (like the server_name in /join/{roomIdOrAlias})
Option to only get notifications on finished builds was added.
buildbot-matrix is a small plugin for the Buildbot CI framework which sends notifications to matrix rooms.
It's available an GitHub and PyPi, take a look at https://github.com/HayWo/buildbot-matrix for more information.
I, Half-Shot, changed the status of the IRC Bridge on https://matrix.org/docs/projects/bridge/matrix-org-irc-bridge from "Early beta" to "Stable". This does not mean it's feature complete, or even all the way there, but it sure doesn't crash nearly as often as it did when I started, so that's good enough for me.
Hey folks, we've released the first RC for 1.4.0 of the slack bridge. This change includes a number of bug fixes around puppeting, but includes a few nice to haves like a /ready endpoint for kube/docker deployments and setting profile information on startup. Please test, and feedback in #matrix_appservice_slack:cadair.com :)
I've been working on improving the reliability of my bridges, primarily by making sure that the user knows if something went wrong. All my bridges now support delivery receipts (implemented as bridge bot read receipts) and can send delivery error messages if there was an error bridging a message. The Facebook and Hangouts bridges also now send connection status messages to a bridge notice room like WhatsApp already did before.
Minetrix
Certainly not from this week, but we haven't featured it before: Minetrix allows you to bridge a Minecraft server with a Matrix room.
A Matrix webclient written in (mostly) Rust using the official Matrix-Rust-SDK and Rusts WASM Support.
Daydream is the Idea of a Rust Matrix Client. It is still in a very early state and at the time of writing this supports basic displaying of text, image and bot messages as well as sending plain text and markdown.
Thanks devinr528 for sharing this
WIP Command line Matrix client using matrix-rust-sdk:
Display read receipts for the last few messages
Display membership status when updated
Join a room you have been invited to
Client sends read receipts to server
Display when messages have been read
Leave a room by pressing Delete key (this should probably be a Ctrl-some key deal...)
Specify homeserver to join on start up (before the login screen)
Simply run rumatui [HOMESERVER], defaults to "http://matrix.org"
Displays errors, albeit not very helpful or specific
Receive and display messages
formatted messages display as rendered markdown
Send messages
local echo is removed
Send textbox grows as more lines of text are added
Selectable rooms list
change rooms using the arrow keys, making this clickable may be difficult
Login widget is click/arrow key navigable
hides password
A new notification bar under the message window displays notifications such as membership changes, typing, and read notices.
I am hoping to have an actual release on crates.io by the end of the day. If you have any thoughts join #rumatui:matrix.org or check it out on github.
starting work on shifting the UX for the encryption upgrade towards using recovery keys in favor of passphrases.
starting early work on a redesigned matrix.to website
starting looking to integrate riot desktop with the native password manager of your platform of choice through keytar
fixing some issues with the (still experimental) IRC layout
iterating on the (also still experimental) new room list
looking into some issues that arose from the cross-signing release
Riot-iOS
Says Manu:
Riot-iOS (and MatrixSDK and MatrixKit) is now fully compatible with iOS13 SDK. A TestFlight 0.12.0 will be available soon.
The work is still on its branches (xcode11). It comes with the new notification service mechanism and we want to run a lot of tests next week before going to production.
Nheko
Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE (with the notable exception being device verification for now) and intends to be full featured and nice to look at
After explaining cross signing to others multiple times in the past and seeing the question again on mastodon, I decided to write a short blog post on the topic, explaining how the keys interact with each other and how Alice's devices then end up trusting Bob's devices. You can read it over on https://jcg.re/blog/quick-overview-matrix-cross-signing/
Cross-signing implementors guide
This one isn't quite merged yet as we're going to give a thorough review, but big thank you to sorunome for taking the time to put this together:
While implementing cross-signing for fluffychat soru decided to write a guide that would help other client developers to implement that, too. So far it is still WIP and doesn't cover too much, yet, but soru might have typed up more once this TWIM goes live. The PR (and thus the markdown of the guide) can be found here: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/pull/740
It's a bunch of people who are passively learning design for their matrix projects. You might pick up a few things if you join :p
Dept of Ping 🏓
Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server. Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.
